In terms of resource consumption, nothing is quite as wasteful as death. Consider that in a typical year cemeteries in the United States require:

830,000 gallons of embalming fluid.
1.64 million tons of reinforced concrete for burial vaults.
90,000 tons of steel for caskets.
30 million board feet of hardwood for caskets.
2,700 tons of copper and bronze.

"Stories & Tunes" is the title of a keynote I gave last year at SolarFest. In the talk I tell a sequence of stories taken from my professional life that illustrate a point about the state of our environment. There's the story of Paramount Pictures threatening to sue me; the story of setting off to visit every American brewery; the story of launching the National Tour of Solar Homes.